Susan Sontag: An Annotated Bibliographycatalogues the works of one of America's most prolific and important 20th century authors. Known for her philosophical writings on American culture, topics left untouched by Sontag's writings are few and far between. This volume is an exhaustive collection that includes her novels, essays, reviews, films and interviews. Each entry is accompanied by an annotated bibliography.

FILM ] BIOGRAPHY

Few Hollywood directors had a higher profile in the 1930s than Frank Capra (1897D1991). He served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and of the Screen Directors Guild. He won three Academy Awards as best director and was widely acclaimed as the man most responsible for making Columbia Pictures a success.

This popularity was established and sustained by films that spoke to and for the times--"It Happened One Night," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," "Meet John Doe," and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." These replicated the nation's hopes and dreams for a national community. He worked with some of the brightest stars in Hollywood--James Stewart, Clark Gable, Jean Arthur, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Donna Reed, and Ann-Margret.

Capra's interviews express his connection to the national audience and explore his own story. He was a Sicilian immigrant boy who survived rough-and-tumble beginnings to become Hollywood's most bankable director. In reflecting on his life, almost every one of his films was a parable of acclaim verging on disaster. He spent much of the 1940s in uniform while making films for the War Department. Although Capra was an optimist, World War II and his series of "Why We Fight" films called his legendary optimism into question. His postwar film "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) gave an answer to those questions with an astonishing directness Capra never equaled again.

In 1971 he published his autobiography, "The Name Above the Title." Many of the interviews collected here come from this period when, as an elder statesman of motion picture art and history, he reflected on his long career. The interviews portray the Capra legend vividly and demonstrate why the warm relations between Capra and his audiences continue to inspire acclaim and admiration.

Leland Poague, a professor of English at Iowa State University, is the editor of "Conversations with Susan Sontag" (University Press of Mississippi). He is the author of "Another Frank Capra" and "The Cinema of Frank Capra: An Approach to Film Comedy.""

Another Frank Capra offers a new interpretation of the great Hollywood director beyond the patriotic sentimentalist or the cynical opportunist that he has been taken for. Often cast as a cinematic simpleton or primitive, Capra's exploitation of the stylistic and narrative resources of cinema was, in fact, extremely self-conscious and adventurous in ways typical of artistic modernism. His modernism is also evident in his repeated and strong identification with female characters. Informed by recent work in genre theory and feminist psychology, Another Frank Capra shows Capra to be a 'proto-feminist' director whose feminism has been entirely neglected by previous critics.

Here is a collection of interviews that cover the period from 1967 through 1993. Many are translations of interviews that originally appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or Swedish periodicals. Several are published here for the first time in any language. Giving attention to Sontag's education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic.

Born in New York City, reared in Arizona and California, educated at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne, appointed to teaching positions in English, philosophy, and religion, she is a woman whose restlessly independent and resolutely transcultural temperament was already well established when she boxed up the manuscript of "The Benefactor" and submitted it to Farrar & Straus in 1962. By 1992, when her much acclaimed novel "The Volcano Lover: A Romance" was published, "The Benefactor" alone had gone through twenty-one editions in nine languages.